Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has signed a memo directing the military to defend the US midterm elections from foreign interference, the Pentagon said Monday.
US Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwarfare unit, and combat support agencies will “deploy advanced intelligence and cyber capabilities” to “identify, disrupt, and neutralize foreign interference in US democratic processes,” the department said in a news release.
The memo, which comes about five weeks before the midterm elections, directs the command to work with the Department of Homeland Security to counter foreign cyber threats to US election infrastructure.
The activities outlined in the memo are largely things that US military and spy agencies were doing to protect American elections from foreign threats prior to Donald Trump returning to the presidency in 2025. Weeks before the 2024 presidential election, for example, Cyber Command hackers carried out a secret operation to disrupt the work of Russian trolls spewing false information at US voters, CNN previously reported.
But the second Trump administration has disbanded or downsized several government centers, namely within the FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that were tasked with repelling foreign influence operations. Trump has also continued to dismiss or question past US intelligence about Russian and Chinese efforts to influence elections. Those factors prompted widespread concern among current and former US national security officials that the second Trump administration was not prioritizing defending US elections from foreign meddling.
Those concerns were heightened in April when the new head of Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, told lawmakers that he didn’t know if a specialized military and intelligence team dedicated to thwarting foreign threats to elections had been stood up for the midterm elections.
For every general and midterm election since the 2020 election, the team — known as the Election Security Group (ESG) — has been a hub for officials from the NSA and Cyber Command to share intelligence and launch counter attacks against trolls from Russia, Iran and elsewhere who were trying to undermine US elections. The group was a response to Russia’s multipronged influence operation aimed at the 2016 US election, when intelligence and security agencies were caught flat-footed.
It was not immediately clear what role, if any, that group will play in the new activity ordered by Hegseth.
Cyber Command and the NSA “regularly counter actions by malicious foreign cyber actors including those with the intent to interfere with our democratic process,” Rudd said in a statement on Monday.
“What concerns me is that [Rudd] testified as recently as April that he wasn’t sure if an Election Security Group existed at the command,” Andrew Schoka, who worked at Cyber Command in the 2020 election cycle, told CNN. “The ESG’s work takes months of planning and coordination, and a lot of their impact takes place far in advance of Election Day. If that’s just being started now, you’re really limiting the impact that you’re able to have on adversaries before the midterms.”